Knocking at the door of hell : utopian dialogism in Hama Tuma's “the case of the illiterate saboteur"

Abstract EN

In the process of coming to grips with their national identity, post-independent African countries have experienced the traumatic repercussions of a series of civil wars, oppressive regimes and dreadful corruption.

The shift from colonialism to independence has paradoxically proved to be distressing to the various African peoples, which continue to suffer from totalitarian systems of government.

Such political upheaval could not go unnoticed by African writers, who attempt to record the horrific macabre image of successive corrupt regimes.

In the short story “The Illiterate Saboteur” from the collection entitled The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor (1993), Hama Tuma depicts the morbid scene of an oppressive political regime and directs sharp criticism towards the political challenges of such a ruthless system.

The suggested paper will principally examine the selected text at the intersection of utopian/dystopian fiction, while drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque.

The latter unfolds the adopted narrative strategies to interpolate and subvert the harrowing conditions and atrocities suffered by helpless subjects at the hands of their despotic ruler.

The grotesque and gruesome realm evidently reflects a Kafkaesque streak, whereby manifestations of tyranny and injustice are dominant, and oppressor and oppressed are inevitably entangled in a nightmarish conflict, reminiscent of an Orwellian dystopia.